REPOST: Why I am Travelling Light this Summer

Candace Davis of huffingtonpost.com tells us the benefits of packing light and how to successfully pull it off.

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Everyone thought I was either brave or crazy, maybe both, when I decided to travel through Europe this summer with a 25 L backpack weighing only 6 kg, but it was one of the best decisions I made and here's why:

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1. Stairs, stairs and more stairs. If you've ever travelled through Europe you'll know that there are often several flights of stairs to climb if you ever want to get, well anywhere.
2. Summer time. It's pretty easy to travel light when you're visiting a warm climate. I packed two dresses, three pairs of pants, four shirts, and a pair of pyjamas, plus my laptop, book, and toiletries.
3. Ease of movement. When you're travelling on your own, or with a tour group (I've done both on this trip) you often have to be really quick on your feet--running for the last train, rushing to get through a crowded square, beating the crowd through customs or getting out of a potentially sticky situation. Ease of movement is important when you're an independent traveller... you don't have anyone else you can count on.
4. Save money. When you don't have much space to put stuff, you can't really buy it. I have seen a few things that I would have otherwise bought but I couldn't due to limited space. Rather than seeing it as a missed opportunity, I just avoid the shopping areas altogether and check out everything else the city has to offer... especially by way of food.
5. Reduced waiting times. Goodbye waiting at the baggage carousel, wondering if your bag has made it half way across the world. I just take my bag as carry-on and hop straight off my flight and make my way through customs.

Tips for travelling light 

It's not always going to be easy to travel light, and you will have to repack your bag at least every couple of days to make room for everything, but here are some tips to make things easier:

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• Roll up your clothes, you'll be surprised how much space you will save.
• Remember to only take toiletries less than 100 ml for all international flights (this also significantly reduces the weight of your pack).
• Put the things you will use the least at the bottom of your bag. It took me about a week to remember to put my toiletries and pyjamas at the top of the bag for easy access.
• Pack things you're willing to leave behind. I am willing to leave behind all of the clothes I packed if I find something better to replace them with. This also helps refresh your wardrobe, as wearing the same few outfits for weeks on end can get a little tiresome.
• Check the carry-on weight limit of your airline. I had some flights with 10 kg limits, but some were only 7 kg so I had to stick to the lower limit or risk paying for it, literally.
• Check the banned substances list--no batteries, toiletries over 100 ml, tweezers, nail files, razors, etc. can be in your carry-on.
• Hand wash your clothes. Unfortunately a lot of European hotels don't really support washing in the hand basin but I highly recommend finding a way. If I am staying somewhere for more than one night I will get the hand soap or travel wash out and give my clothes a quick wash. It saves time and money at the laundromat and if you only have a few outfits, you will be washing every couple of days.
• Re-wear your clothes. Okay, this one is a little trickier when you've had a big day on the town sweating your little armpits out, but you can quite easily wear your pants at least twice. This also saves on hand washing.

Visit this Louis Habash Facebook page to get more traveling tips.

Traveling dirt-cheap

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When I stepped outside at 5:45 am to jog yesterday, my nextdoor neighbors, Mike and Lyn, joined me. They started talking about their vacation home in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, which of course awoke my yet sleepy senses. At this time of year, as city life becomes hotter and smellier, a beach getaway in Brazil would be perfect. More so now that Brazil is becoming increasingly popular as a travel destination. However, the expensive airfare and the high prices in the country are a bummer for me. As a frequent traveler, I’d like my beach destination to be as cheap as it is memorable.

That is why I ended up choosing a beach haven closer to home, as picturesque as Brazil but more affordable: Dunedin, Florida. Dunedin beaches boast green-blue waters and pristine white powder-like sand. They also host virgin forests for the hikers and the adventurers. My obsession is Caladesi Island State Park, home to one of the most undisturbed barrier islands in Florida. With a little maneuvering of my cost-cutting skills and whatnots, I secured this beach travel for a steal … A prudent decision, I should say.

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For those who are on the lookout for vacation cost cutting advice this summer, The New York Times has a helpful compilation for you. Mind you, I do and swear by most of them, with numbers five and nine as my favorite hacks.

Cutting costs on the process of searching, booking, and traveling involve craft and skill, mastered by seasoned travel writers. That’s the essence of what I do.

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For more travel tips and related topics, visit Louis Habash’s Facebook page.

REPOST: The world’s most ethical countries: 2014

This article from BBC.com shares some of the most ethical countries around the world. Interested to know? Read more:

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What makes the Bahamas a more ethical vacation choice than Costa Rica?

That’s the crux of a recent survey about ethical travel, a movement that encourages travellers to be mindful about the impact of bringing tourism dollars to one country over another. To encourage responsible globetrotting, a California nonprofit Ethical Traveler has been regularly compiling a list of its top 10 ethical destinations since 2006. The surprise: 2014’s list, which came out in late 2013, has three new contenders: the Bahamas, Chile and Dominica. So what are they doing right that Costa Rica, Ghana and Samoa (which fell off the list from 2013) didn’t do enough of?

The answer lies in the way Ethical Traveler evaluates countries for its top 10 list.

• Related article: Which countries deserve your money?

In addition to more standard criteria like unspoiled natural beauty and authentic cultural experiences, researchers judged destinations on 35 metrics in four categories: environment protection, social welfare, human rights, and for the first time, animal welfare. In other words, judges considered quality of drinking water in the category of environmental protection, women’s rights in the category of human rights, and so on.

The Bahamas won its way onto the list by making efforts to reduce human trafficking and expand national parks and protected areas, such as theAndros West Side National Park, which grew from 882,000 acres to nearly 1.3 million acres. Chile improved its gender equality scores and launched a few ambitious environmental initiatives – including a program to move logging workers into various tourism roles. And a plan to become carbon negative – that is, minimize and offset carbon emissions – by 2020 helped Dominica make the cut.

The complete list for 2014 (in alphabetical order) includes the Bahamas, Barbados, Cape Verde, Chile, Dominica, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius, Palau and Uruguay. Ethical Traveler does not rank the countries within the top 10.

Travellers can “vote with their wings”, said Jeff Greenwald, Ethical Traveler’s founder and executive director. “We feel that we can make a difference in those countries because they really want to try to do the right thing. If we can send more travellers there because of their good policies, we think they’ll really stand up and take notice.”

Three countries that fell off the list from 2013 – Costa Rica, Ghana and Samoa – slid backward on key metrics such as environmental protection and human rights violations, said Michael McColl, Ethical Traveler’s co-founder and director of communications.

Costa Rica, for example, is a major hub for human trafficking and its government allows persecution of activists working against illegal shark finning and sea turtle trades, McColl said. Ghana dropped from last year’s list due to discrimination against same-sex couples (same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Ghana, and there is no legal recognition of same-sex couples. Ghanaian law also does not protect people fromdiscrimination based on sexual orientation.) And Samoa fell from the top 10 due to unsustainable logging, failure to guarantee LGBT rights and poor women’s rights. Nonetheless, these countries still received high marks overall, and are still among the more ethical countries a traveller can visit.

“You want to put your money where your beliefs are,” Greenwald says. “Everyone loves the thought of travelling to Thailand or Cambodia or Burma, [but these places] don’t really have great human rights records. Why not use your travel dollars to show your support and solidarity for countries that are struggling to have good government and attract travellers? Why not reward them? It could create a groundswell of economic incentive for countries to do the right thing.”

For ethical properties and tours within a country, the site Green Travel Reviews evaluates environmentally and socially conscious properties likeRosalie Bay, the only Green Globe-certified resort in Dominica which has won accolades for its wind- and solar-powered energy, including more than 200 solar panels; locally- and organically-sourced food; and protected black sand beach where endangered sea turtles nest. In Costa Rica, Casa Corcovado Jungle Lodge is one of the few eco-resorts to earn a five-Leaf rating from Costa Rica’s Certification for Sustainable Tourism for its pristine 170-acre nature preserve as well as a number of eco-initiatives including a solar electric system, hydroelectric turbine and a hybrid solar convection system for heating water.

"I believe that we, as a tourism entity, have a responsibility to the travelling public and the beautiful destination we represent to use natural resources in a way that protects the local environment and improves the well-being of its residents,” said Rosalie Bay owner Beverly Deikel.

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Hi, Louis Habash here! I love traveling and going to place where I've never been to. Join me in my travels by following me on Facebook.

REPOST: 7 Travel Rules You Should Definitely Ignore

This HuffingtonPost.com article tells us that it's ok to break the rules sometimes, well at least in traveling.

You don't have to listen to everything your mother tells you.

As millennials, we've decided that some travel rules are more than okay to ditch.

"Know before you go." 
Detailing an itinerary before your trip is so last decade. The "must-sees" on travel sites or in guidebooks often turn out to be jam-packed with tourists, and they rob you of an opportunities to see through a local's eyes. Sketch a general outline of activities if you must, but stay open to scouting little-known gems once you're there and taking recommendations from people you meet.

"Take lots of pictures." 
Instagram has shifted our mindset from "I'm going to take a picture, because I'm having so much fun" to "I'm going to take a picture, because my friends will think I had so much fun." A trip, of all places, is where you should practice living in the moment. Go without the camera.

"Don't talk to strangers." 
While avoiding the obvious risks, try striking up a chat with any locals you come across. They've seen everything there is to see--so when they say they know of the best noodle house or cheapest ferry, you can bet they're right.

"Pack light." 
Those who can fit four weeks of clothes into their carry-on deserve a trophy, it's true. But aside from being painfully heavy to drag through an airport, squashing all your stuff together in a duffel leaves no room for extra items (like the forgotten parka you'll have to buy at your destination) nor souvenirs (like the vase that'd be perfect for your kitchen, if only you had room to bring it back). Quite a few airlines will check your first bag for free... put your pride aside and take them up on it.

"Cross it off your bucket list."
The danger with bucket lists is they can make traveling seem like a chore. Go where you want when you want, and do what you want while you're there. Traveling is supposed to make you happy-- not proud that you checked off a list written decades ago.

"Bring a good beach read."
Society has officially moved past chick lit and into deeper intellectual realms. Use your lounge hours to dig into a meaty newspaper -- the Kindle edition won't blow around in the wind -- or listen to Podcasts on a topic you've always wondered about. If you manage to learn something during your downtime, you'll return home feeling pleasantly accomplished.

"Use the buddy system."
 Ok yes, there are circumstances in which traveling with another person is crucial to safety. But the buddy system fails as an all-encompassing rule... sometimes, places are better experienced alone. The best travelers are those who know these places when they see one, then summon the courage to fly solo.


Louis Habash writes articles on the places that he has visited. Read more articles related to traveling  by visiting this blog site.

REPOST: Planning a Trip: Guidebook Versus the Web

Are guidebooks still reliable just like the old times? This article by Seth Kugel that compares guidebooks and information from the World Wide Web is something that travelers must read.

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I recently asked my friend Doug if he still uses guidebooks to plan his trips abroad. He’s a smart guy and a veteran traveler, so I figured he would have a thoughtful reason one way or the other. He did not.

“I probably don’t use guidebooks because I’ve essentially forgotten they exist,” he said.

I’m guessing Doug is not alone. Sales of international travel guides in the United States are down 42 percent since 2006, according to the Nielsen BookScan Travel Publishing Yearbook. As online resources have expanded, I’ll bet lots of people have shifted their travel planning to the web without giving it any thought at all. And I suspect some who still use guidebooks think they’re wasting money for what they could find online free.

But are they? I decided to try an experiment: I would buy a brand-new guidebook, comb through it, then to try to replicate or improve upon what I found in the free but chaotic bounty of the World Wide Web. I bought and read most of the Lonely Planet’s Hungary guide (which I chose because Lonely Planet is popular among Frugal Traveler readers and I know nothing about Hungary) and then got to work.

My first stop was LonelyPlanet.com, where I was somewhat shocked to find most of the content I had just paid $24.99 for was free online: a section on the country’s history, practical information, specifics like airport transport in Budapest, and many more listings for hotels, restaurants and attractions than were in the book. (The site had reviews for 200 restaurants in Budapest while my book had only 48.)

Still, a few things were missing — important things. The dozens of indexed city and town and neighborhood maps were absent. Suggested itineraries were gone. There was no glossary of useful Hungarian phrases. (A spokeswoman for Lonely Planet said some guidebooks had significantly less online.) And, though the site was fine for finding something specific, it was clumsier to browse through and get a feel for the country, especially on a mobile device. The formatting also makes it difficult and time-consuming to copy, paste and print your way to a homemade guidebook.

Still, Lonely Planet’s robust web showing does not apply to all guidebook companies — Rough Guides, for example, offers limited content online. So I also tried an à la carte approach.

For lodging, the obvious first stop was TripAdvisor.com, which replaces a guidebook’s curated list of tightly written reviews with free-for-all user evaluations, only partly controllable by tools that filter and rank results by price, availability, location, type of reviewer (family, solo, people in your Facebook network) and more. Booking.com andHotels.com also depend on customer reviews. Is that a valid substitute? To many, it is. Even if you prefer curated picks, there are free sites like TheHotelGuru.com, with reviews writers contribute themselves or cull from guidebooks and articles. (Of course, as with flights, the most up-to-date information on hotel prices is online.)

For sightseeing information, there were endless options, and I only scratched the surface. I checked Hungary’s official tourist website, Gotohungary.com, which had good if limited ideas, but was lacking practical information like prices. My next stop was Wikivoyage.org, which is run by the Wikimedia Foundation and is the closest thing I found in format to an online guidebook. It had plenty of ideas for Hungary, although the length and quality of descriptions were erratic, the writing was dull and practical information was again scarce.

I also tried the user-generated reviews on Gogobot.com, which allows you to see rankings by people in “tribes” like yours: budget travelers, “trendsters,” “spiritual seekers” and the like. Not bad.

But to me, the site that came closest to replicating a guidebook experience, while still harnessing the power of the Internet, is Stay.com. Sights and activities (and hotels and restaurants) are separated by category, and there are curated guides by the site’s editors, users and local experts (“Family Fun in Budapest,” for example). Best of all, you can click to add any item to your own “city guide”; the result is a personalized itinerary, complete with customized map, that can be downloaded to your cellphone and used without piling up cellular data.

There are so many ways to find restaurants online, I don’t even know where to begin. I already had culled ideas from the sites I’ve mentioned. Next, local resources: with a simple Google search, I found a few compelling sites in English (chew.hu, Best of Budapest,Everythingbudapest.eu), as well as articles published in newspapers like this one.Chowhound’s discussion boards had what sounded like knowledgeable Budapest tips. And I haven’t mentioned the power of Facebook, Twitter, Couchsurfing and online travel forums for getting personalized advice.

It may sound like the web was blowing away my guidebook — but not so fast. Literally: It’s not so fast. Marking up the guidebook took a few hours and came to an obvious end (the last page). But I could have sifted through these sites forever. For some people, that’s fine: it’s been shown that planning a trip actually makes us happier than the trip itself. But choice can be paralyzing. For those who want the deciding done for them, a trusted guidebook brand wins, at least in planning an agenda.

The score was more or less tied in some other areas, like overviews on culture and history, collections of some useful phrases and important cultural mores like tipping. Wikivoyage alone covered most of those.

Still, I found three ways that a guidebook stomps the web almost every time:

First, those curated maps. No site I tried — Google, Michelin, Bing — could match the book’s maps, even after being customized to pinpoint hotels and restaurants and sights. If you do want to print out city or town maps and mark them up yourself, I found Bing Maps to be by far the cleanest-looking and easiest to print. (Use the full-screen feature, take a screen shot and print.)

Second, guidebooks offer information you may never think to look for online. In the Hungary book, I happened on a section about common tourist scams in Budapest, and an article on Budapest’s Jewish population — neither of which I would have thought to look up on my own.

Finally, there’s simple convenience. A guidebook means an extra pound or so in your bag. But it’s all in one place, doesn’t run out of batteries or go out of range or use international data and is unlikely to be ripped out of your hand by a thief. And for infrequent travelers, it doesn’t have a steep learning curve.

If the web is a fully stocked kitchen where an experienced chef given enough time can produce a brilliant meal, guidebooks are an energy bar, packing all the nutrients you need into a handy package that can be tossed into your bag. Of course, there’s one catch: at $25, that’s one expensive energy bar.

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This is Louis Habash. I love traveling and reading about helpful tips that I can bring when I travel. If you love these too, Follow my Facebook page for updates.

Life lessons from traveling

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Travel has always been part of life. Growing up, I never thought I would be drifting from one place to another because of my love of culture, geography, and tradition.

Yet, looking back at all my adventures (and misadventures), I realized the immense power of travel not only as a way of relaxation but also for learning life’s greatest lessons.

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After years of being on the road, these ideas hit me:

Change is for everyone. When you feel unhappy, sometimes the answer is change. Traveling around the world is about change—places, cultures, shelters, languages, food and many more. Personally, travel has revealed to me my high standards of happiness. Today, I have learned how to be happy even from the simplest things in life.

People are innately good. In different countries around the world, I have seen and met various people who did not only help me with directions, but also shaped my character down the line. Through my experiences, I have learned not to be overly guarded and judgmental. Sometimes, it just takes time and a little effort to crack the shell of strangers.

Languages are important. Once you start traveling the world, either for a job or for vacation, you will realize that speaking English is not the only passport to success in communication or survival. Having immersed in diverse cultures, I realized that not all streets are responsive to an outsider who never took the time to pick up a word or two in the local tongue.

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A journalism graduate of San Francisco State University, Louis Habash now works as a freelance travel writer who dabbles in travel photography and nature tripping. Know more about him by visiting his Youtube channel.

Adventures in Venice: The gondola experience

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The Innocents Abroad, one of Mark Twain’s bestselling books, contains the author’s description of the Venetian Gondola as a “free and graceful” serpent. He traveled Venice a hundred years ago. He humorously chronicled Venice in the book, describing the curiosity of urban life with gondolas and gondoliers.

Being a fan of Twain, I knocked some more ambition into my travel dreams: “Louis Habash you have to explore Venice and Gondola!”

So I did, and the result? It was magical!

Although it can be quite costly, taking a gondola ride through the canals of Venice can be very romantic and interesting.

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For this particular trip, I decided on a private tour at around 4 p.m. to catch the mindblowing sunset. I was alone but a typical Gondola can seat between two and four people—perfect for just you and your special someone, or a small family.

By definition, a gondola is a flat boat fashioned out of wood. It is typically about 11-12 meters long and is hand-built in special workshops, a few of which are still around today. According to historians, the earliest recorded use of gondolas in Venice is in 1094.

Gondolas stand out for the experience they give to the travelers. As my gondolier was serenading me (yes, they sing!), the view around the canals loomed over and past me in a calm ambience of mystery.

Gondolas are easy rides, especially with gondoliers who amble along, entertaining passengers with their humorous spiels and stories.

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Louis Habash is a freelance travel writer and photographer. To know more about his travels and adventures, follow him on Twitter.